“I tell you what it is, Renny,” said Yates, a few days after the soap
episode, as he swung in his hammock at the camp, “I’m learning something
new every day.”
“Not really?” asked the professor in surprise.
“Yes, really. I knew it would astonish you. My chief pleasure in life,
professor, is the surprising of you. I sometimes wonder why it delights
me; it is so easily done.”
“Never mind about that. What have you been learning?”
“Wisdom, my boy; wisdom in solid chunks. In the first place, I am
learning to admire the resourcefulness of these people around us.
Practically, they make everything they need. They are the most
self-helping people that I was ever thrown among. I look upon theirs as
the ideal life.”
“I think you said something like that when we first came here.”
“I said that, you ass, about camping out. I am talking now about farm
life. Farmers eliminate the middleman pretty effectually, and that in
itself is going a long way toward complete happiness. Take the making
of soap, that I told you about; there you have it, cheap and good. When
you’ve made it, you know what is in it, and I’ll be hanged if you do
when you pay a big price for it in New York. Here they make pretty
nearly everything they need, except the wagon and the crockery; and I’m
not sure but they made them a few years back. Now, when a man with a
good sharp ax and a jack-knife can do anything from building his house
to whittling out a chair, he’s the most independent man on earth. Nobody
lives better than these people do. Everything is fresh, sweet, and good.
Perhaps the country air helps; but it seems to me I never tasted such
meals as Mrs. Bartlett, for instance, gets up. They buy nothing at the
stores except the tea, and I confess I prefer milk myself. My tastes
were always simple.”
“And what is the deduction?”
“Why, that this is the proper way to live. Old Hiram has an anvil and an
amateur forge. He can tinker up almost anything, and that eliminates the
blacksmith. Howard has a bench, saws, hammers, and other tools, and
that eliminates the carpenter. The women eliminate the baker, the soap
boiler, and a lot of other parasites. Now, when you have eliminated
all the middlemen, then comes independence, and consequently complete
happiness. You can’t keep happiness away with a shotgun then.”
“But what is to become of the blacksmith, the carpenter, and all the
rest?”
“Let them take up land and be happy too; there’s plenty of land. The
land is waiting for them. Then look how the master is eliminated. That’s
the most beautiful riddance of all. Even the carpenter and blacksmith
usually have to work under a boss; and if not, they have to depend on
the men who employ them. The farmer has to please nobody but himself.
That adds to his independence. That’s why old Hiram is ready to fight
the first comer on the slightest provocation. He doesn’t care whom he
offends, so long as it isn’t his wife. These people know how to make
what they want, and what they can’t make they do without. That’s the
way to form a great nation. You raise, in this way, a self-sustaining,
resolute, unconquerable people. The reason the North conquered the South
was because we drew our armies mostly from the self-reliant farming
class, while we had to fight a people accustomed for generations to
having things done for them.”
“Why don’t you buy a farm, Yates?”
“Several reasons. I am spoiled for the life here. I am like the drunkard
who admires a temperate life, yet can’t pass a ginshop. The city virus
is in my blood. And then, perhaps, after all, I am not quite satisfied
with the tendency of farm life; it is unfortunately in a transition
state. It is at the frame-house stage, and will soon blossom into the
red-brick stage. The log-house era is what I yearn for. Then everything
a person needed was made on the farm. When the brick-house era sets in,
the middleman will be rampant. I saw the other day at the Howards’ a set
of ancient stones that interested me as much as an Assyrian marble would
interest you. They were old, home-made millstones, and they have not
been used since the frame house was built. The grist mill at the village
put them out of date. And just here, notice the subtlety of the crafty
middleman. The farmer takes his grist to the mill, and the miller does
not charge him cash for grinding it. He takes toll out of the bags,
and the farmer has a vague idea that he gets his grinding for almost
nothing. The old way was the best, Renny, my boy. The farmer’s son won’t
be as happy in the brick house which the mason will build for him as his
grandfather was in the log house he built for himself. And fools call
this change the advance of civilization.”
“There is something to be said for the old order of things,” admitted
Renmark. “If a person could unite the advantages of what we call
civilization with the advantages of a pastoral life, he would inaugurate
a condition of things that would be truly idyllic.”
“That’s so, Renmark, that’s so!” cried Yates enthusiastically. “A
brownstone mansion on Fifth Avenue, and a log hut on the shores of Lake
Superior! That would suit me down to the ground. Spend half the year in
each place.”
“Yes,” said the professor meditatively; “a log hut on the rocks and
under the trees, with the lake in front, would be very nice if the hut
had a good library attached.”
“And a daily paper. Don’t forget the press.”
“No. I draw the line there. The daily paper would mean the daily steamer
or the daily train. The one would frighten away the fish, and the other
would disturb the stillness with its whistle.”
Yates sighed. “I forgot about the drawbacks,” he said. “That’s the
trouble with civilization. You can’t have the things you want without
bringing in their trail so many things you don’t want. I shall have to
give up the daily paper.”
“Then there is another objection, worse than either steamer or train.”
“What’s that?”
“The daily paper itself.”
Yates sat up indignantly.
“Renmark!” he cried, “that’s blasphemy. For Heaven’s sake, man, hold
something sacred. If you don’t respect the press, what do you respect?
Not my most cherished feelings, at any rate, or you wouldn’t talk
in that flippant manner. If you speak kindly of my daily paper, I’ll
tolerate your library.”
“And that reminds me: Have you brought any books with you, Yates? I have
gone through most of mine already, although many of them will bear going
over again; still, I have so much time on my hands that I think I may
indulge in a little general reading. When you wrote asking me to meet
you in Buffalo, I thought you perhaps intended to tramp through the
country, so I did not bring as many books with me as I should have done
if I had known you were going to camp out.”
Yates sprang from the hammock.
“Books? Well, I should say so! Perhaps you think I don’t read anything
but the daily papers. I’d have you know that I am something of a reader
myself. You mustn’t imagine you monopolize all the culture in the
township, professor.”
The young man went into the tent, and shortly returned with an armful of
yellow-covered, paper-bound small volumes, which he flung in profusion
at the feet of the man from Toronto. They were mostly Beadle’s Dime
Novels, which had a great sale at the time.
“There,” he said, “you have quantity, quality, and variety, as I have
before remarked. ‘The Murderous Sioux of Kalamazoo;’ that’s a good one.
A hair-raising Indian story in every sense of the word. The one you are
looking at is a pirate story, judging by the burning ship on the cover.
But for first-class highwaymen yarns, this other edition is the best.
That’s the ‘Sixteen String Jack set.’ They’re immense, if they do cost
a quarter each. You must begin at the right volume, or you’ll be sorry.
You see, they never really end, although every volume is supposed to be
complete in itself. They leave off at the most exciting point, and are
continued in the next volume. I call that a pretty good idea, but it’s
rather exasperating if you begin at the last book. You’ll enjoy this
lot. I’m glad I brought them along.”
“It is a blessing,” said Renmark, with the ghost of a smile about his
lips. “I can truthfully say that they are entirely new to me.”
“That’s all right, my boy,” cried Yates loftily, with a wave of his
hand. “Use them as if they were your own.”
Renmark arose leisurely and picked up a quantity of the books.
“These will do excellently for lighting our morning camp fire,” he said.
“And if you will allow me to treat them as if they were my own, that is
the use to which I will put them. You surely do not mean to say that you
read such trash as this, Yates?”
“Trash?” exclaimed Yates indignantly. “It serves me right. That’s what
a man gets for being decent to you, Renny. Well, you’re not compelled to
read them; but if you put one of them in the fire, your stupid treatises
will follow, if they are not too solid to burn. You don’t know good
literature when you see it.”
The professor, buoyed up, perhaps, by the conceit which comes to a
man through the possession of a real sheepskin diploma, granted by a
university of good standing, did not think it necessary to defend his
literary taste. He busied himself in pruning a stick he had cut in the
forest, and finally he got it into the semblance of a walking cane. He
was an athletic man, and the indolence of camp life did not suit him as
it did Yates. He tested the stick in various ways when he had trimmed it
to his satisfaction.
“Are you ready for a ten-mile walk?” he asked of the man in the hammock.
“Good gracious, no. Man wants but little walking here below, and he
doesn’t want it ten miles in length either. I’m easily satisfied. You’re
off, are you? Well, so long. And I say, Renny, bring back some bread
when you return to camp. It’s the one safe thing to do.”